This bill is expected to face strong opposition from the fishing industry, which has a powerful voice. However, you can help! You send a letter in support of this policy to Shark Defenders, and they will make sure that it gets into the right hands. Many of the letters will be read out loud as testimony, and receiving a large number of letters in support of the law will be a big help!

Please send these letters to Info AT SharkDefenders DOT com by Monday afternoon U.S. East Coast time (sooner would be better).

Image from SharkDefenders.org

Shark Defenders requests that all letters include the following information:

“1. Your name.
2. Where you live.
3. Who you are and what you do.
4. Your reason for wanting to protect sharks.
5. A request to “please pass Bill No. 44-31 with no weakening amendments.”
6. Why not finish your letter saying something nice about Guam and the Pacific?”

They also list several possible reasons to support the law, though you are free to include whatever reason you want. Here are the suggestions:

“1. The IUCN Shark Specialist Group has found that 1/3 of all shark species are threatened or near threatened with extinction. Another 50% of species do not have enough data to determine their conservation status.
2. Sharks are slow growing, mature late, and produce few young, and biologically are not able to adapt to modern fishing pressures.
3. Sharks have been the ocean’s top predators for 400 millions years, but only in the last 50 have they become prey. Removing predators from ecosystems has cascading effects on lower trophic levels.
4. The practice of shark finning is inhumane and wasteful. It is like cutting down a coconut tree to get a single coconut.
5. Sharks are cool! As a society we’ve stopped killing the big predators on land, the biggest fish in the sea deserve the same protections.
6. Or maybe you have your own reason for wanting to protect sharks?”

We should only be killing animals through necessity, not greed. We are blessed with so many rare & wonderful creatures from all ends of the world. But we do little to protect them. Lets save these wonderful creatures from extinction, so that future generations get to marvel about them also.

Great work well done!
We are trying to prepare a white paper to persuade the Malaysian Government to amend the wildlife law to protect sharks. The copy of the Guam bill is great as a reference – does anyone have a copy of the bills or the subsequent laws for Hawaii, Palau or the Maldives.
please send to
borneo2008-sa at yahoo dot com